Poland is a Catholic country. Is that a truism or a statement of fact? If we really are dealing with
fact—and I address certain doubts below—a variety of
other, far more tangible facts then result from it, among them: an
extremely restrictive antiabortion law; the presence of Catholic
religious instruction and the absence of sexual education in Polish
public schools; the influence of the episcopate on laws regulating in
vitro fertilization;
the privileged status of the Committee on Church Property; the
participation of Church officials in apparently secular ceremonies;
finally, the inevitable voice of a priest as moral authority in
public debates, particularly those related to sexual ethics and
reproductive rights. As philosopher and feminist Magdalena Środa
writes, „[in] Poland, Catholicism is both more and less than a
religion. More, because it is not merely a faith but a way of being
and perceiving the world, a criterion for classifying others, an
object of fashion, fascination, snobbery, an explicit vehicle of
power and an implicit vehicle of censorship (at least
self-censorship). (…) It is also less than religious faith
because it is often reduced to empty rituals.”
Indeed, we are so very Catholic in Poland that even most of Polish
atheists turn out to be Catholic; non-believing to be sure, but
practicing nonetheless. Studies show that the vast majority of Polish
atheists get married in a church (71%) and baptize their children
(74%). It’s a matter of atmosphere, or – as my Catholic
friend explains – it is our karma. Speaking of karma, according
to another interesting poll (from 2006, but probably still valid),
28% of Polish Catholics believe in… reincarnation.

Poland
is a Catholic country,
we hear whenever someone brings up the constitutional autonomy of
Church and state. It turns out that in Poland the separation of
Church and state is supposed to be a friendly
separation.
Sounds reasonable, but what exactly does it mean? Will Catholics
remove crosses from the voting station in my neighborhood to
recognize the separation and respect the autonomy, or should I
pretend in a friendly
manner
that the crosses are not there? The term compromise
has
made a surprising career in this context, consistently used to
silence dissenters: „What do you mean? You don’t want a
compromise?
You’d rather start an ideological
war?
For years this move has served to check public debate on the
consequences of the antiabortion bill. Any effort to re-open this
debate was seen a
priori as
a sign of confrontational tendencies. Since 1989, the legal solutions
concerning reproductive rights have been a series of „compromises”
that Catholics reach with other Catholics, convinced that in this way
they buttress Polishness, or normality. Compromise
has
invariably meant an act of violence and exclusion in the name of the
Catholic majority.

Let
us recall a few key events from the history of reproductive rights in
contemporary Poland. •1990: at the Solidarity
Congress,
the Women’s Committee speaks for abortion rights. Effect:
Solidarity
authorities
dissolve the Women’s Committee. •1992: a spontaneous
movement for a referendum on abortion, the so-called Bujak committees
(perhaps the most widespread grassroots social movement since 1989),
collects well over a million signatures. Effect: the petition is
ignored by the Parliament. The sentence Poland
is a Catholic country is
not a statement of fact but a sort of a spell, a self-fulfilling
prophesy sanctioning existing power relations. The conviction that
Poland
is a Catholic country is
like a quagmire or swamp, sucking us all in, Catholic or not. The
more we sink in it… the more we sink. We have become so
accustomed to the quagmire that we don’t even ask any more why
the ground is so spongy, why so slippery, why the air is so heavy. It
is, after all, only our familiar swamp, exuding its slightly
nauseating vapors; the very air that we breathe. Someone who says
that Poland
is a Catholic country does
not describe any extra-linguistic reality and does not invite a
discussion. The function of this sentence is similar to This
is a free country when
spoken in the U.S. It is not a judgment or an opinion. Rather, it is
a strange mix of tautology, tease, boast or challenge, and call to
battle. The sentence is an excellent example of a perlocutionary act
as defined by Austin, an utterance that not only describes but also
changes reality. In the case of this sentence the changes are gradual
and the power of the spell grows with use. The more we repeat it, the
more Poland becomes a “Catholic country.” And we repeat
it often: a googlesearch
produces 180 thousand examples. Speech acts create reality, calling
to life communicative contexts that make them legible. We
live in a Catholic country is
a master act in this respect. I - the Catholic declare that I feel at
home here. I also suggest that you - the Catholic are also Polish. I
call on the interlocutor’s loyalty, I build a sense of
community and put others in their place. Clearly, they don’t
belong here. Polish Catholicism is like the horseness of a horse;
like the tomatoness of tomato soup. How does one make broth? From
meat and vegetables. What is Catholicism? The faith of the Polish
people. What is Poland? Why, it is a Catholic country. But what are
we really talking about? Does „country”
mean Polish society, the state or the nation? As numerous studies
show, Polish society does not share many of the opinions of the
Catholic Church, and generally does not perceive the Church as an
authority on moral issues. According to the Constitution, the Polish
state is secular. Then what is “the Nation”? Yes, the
Nation seems to be the key here, but the Nation is not something I
dare discuss. Not just yet. We may ask further: does „Catholicism”
refer to faith? Or tradition and custom? Political influence of a
certain institution? All of this reeks of lack of precision. But it
is the swampy ambiguity that is the force behind our sentence.
Bubble,
bubble, Poland is a Catholic country,
whispers the swamp. Bubble,
bubble, if you don’t like it, get out. Bubble, bubble, you
don’t get it? Then you’re not one of us.

I
suppose you wish to know to whom the swamp bubbles. Well, it bubbles
to everyone, of course, but to women somewhat more than to men, it
seems. Why? Because the Church is particularly interested in matters
pertaining to human sexuality and fertility, and these, in both
physiological and cultural terms, constitute a sphere in which women
bear more responsibility and are more vulnerable to pain and loss.
That is why I think that the atheist Church weddings and baptisms are
– how shall I put it? – the product of how women deal
with the Church. It is similar with the mass participation of
children of atheists in religion classes in schools (theoretically
optional, but in practice hard to avoid). Here is how I think it
works. To be excluded is to be different, to be stigmatized is a
source of suffering, for children more than for adults. The very
possibility of a child’s suffering is automatically the source
of worry for the mom. Mothers tend to worry more than fathers.
Mothers feel more guilt, if for no other reason then because they are
held accountable more than fathers are. It is no accident that
Internet debates about whether atheists should baptize their children
are frequented by women more than by men. These are not philosophical
dilemmas, but practical and emotional troubles, resulting from deeply
felt concern that one’s child might get hurt, from the worry
that one won’t be a good enough mother. Do questions of
ideology and freedom of conviction matter in comparison? Clearly not.
Here is a sample of such reasoning: “I would like my son to
have a future choice of what he wants to believe in, and not to serve
as a boost to Church statistics from the first days of his life. The
family will disapprove, but that is what I want. But… these
are my wishes. And the child? Won’t he feel left out as the
only kid who does not go to holy communion? (…) At school,
won’t he feel as if he is worse than other kids? But is this
reason enough to baptize the child and invite the priest to visit our
home, for the child’s sake?”

I
don’t believe women are naturally conservative. I would rather
see this as involuntary conformity to which they are compelled by
cultural pressure. Various things must be done against one’s
own desires, „for
the good of the child.”

Another
dimension of this pressure is the Church’s power to shame, to
create what used to be called a woman’s “disgrace.”
Church teaching theoretically applies to the entire sphere of moral
values, but somehow we hear the bishops making judgments about
apparent “wrongdoings”
in intimate and family life and not about injustice and harm done in
the economic sphere, not to mention cruelty to animals. The Church is
interested in sex and reproduction more than in other aspects of
human life. From the feminist perspective this means simply that it
is interested in controlling women. Church power and authority in
this sphere – in which, let it be added, clergymen can by
definition have no experience –are enormous. The power of the
Church is akin to the power of the patriarch in a traditional family.
Other family members may quietly disagree, but no one dares to
contradict him openly. The father passes judgment, condemns,
criticizes and delivers endless speeches in a tone of omniscience and
thinly veiled resentment. The others, even if they ultimately refuse
to be bullied, judged or bored to tears, are nonetheless forced to
listen to daddy’s diatribes Priests perform a similar function
in the Polish media. During the recent public debate on legislation
concerning infertility treatment, the bishops played the role of
experts. In the summer of 2009, priests, and only priests, debated
the ethical dimension of the conflict between the surrogate mother
who decided to keep the child and the couple who had hired her. The
plight of Agata, a 14-year-old girl who struggled for an abortion in
2008, or the story of Alicja Tysiąc, who successfully sued Poland in
Strasburg after she was denied a legal abortion in 2001– the
ethics of such stories are discussed by the clergy in the supposedly
secular public sphere.

The
privileged position of the Church as a dispenser of values is rarely
discussed in mainstream public debate. Nonetheless, in recent years,
particularly after the death of Pope John Paul II, a certain gap has
appeared, a crack through which one may voice open criticism of the
Church without being associated with the infamous Jerzy Urban. This
gap lends itself to a naïve and melancholy narrative about
boundless gratitude, disappointed hopes and profound mourning. The
gratitude concerns the Church’s position as an ally of the
democratic opposition, a refuge to dissidents and mainstay of
Polishness in the dark times of communism. The disappointed hopes are
mentioned in relation to the Church’s recent turn to the right.
Here the name of Tadeusz Rydzyk, the founder and director of Radio
Maryja, is mentioned with ritual disgust? Finally, the declaration of
mourning after the death of John Paul II allows those who criticize
the Church, even if they are non-believers, to situate themselves
safely on the side of the Church, after all. Let us hear a model
version of this narrative. Here is Adam Michnik:

„…
My hopes that the Polish Church would become the Church of the Gospel
more than an institution were not fulfilled. Today I feel
anticlerical temptation more than I feel like making the effort to
understand. I try to restrain that temptation for reasons of
political opportunism and general cowardice, but it lingers within
me. When I read the majority of the writings identify
themselves as Catholic, I experience estrangement and anxiety. I
never had these feelings when, for years, I read «Tygodnik
Powszechny,» «Więź,» «Znak» and John
Paul II’s encyclicals. Something has changed. Adam Szostkiewicz
wrote an article for «Polityka» in which he invented the
term «de-Wojtylization of Polish Catholicism. There is
something to it, I believe. (…) I consider the present state
of Polish Catholicism a regression from the tone proposed by John
Paul II, Tischner, Turowicz and Mazowiecki. (…) We feel the
loss of John Paul II.

Obviously,
I agree with Michnik that the Church has moved to the right. Yet I am
not satisfied with his tale of the Church that came to love democracy
and pluralism in the times of communism and later supported the new
democracy, only to degenerate into neo-nationalism with the death of
the Pope. An entire decade is missing from this story and that decade
is of crucial significance from the perspective of the history of
women’s rights. What is missing are the efforts of the Church
to limit women’s rights, women’s efforts to oppose those
limitations, and the submissiveness of all subsequent governments
to the pressure of the bishops.

Let
us recall the facts once again. 1990: the Solidarity
Congress
dissolves the Women’s Committee for its refusal to accept the
Church-defined position on women’s rights with humility. 1992:
a referendum on abortion rights fails to take place despite massive
public demand. We may also retrace our steps back to the beginning of
the eighties. It is then that the first anti-abortion campaign of the
Church took place: exhibitions of photographs of mutilated fetuses
set up in churches, widespread circulation of the film Silent
Scream,
organization of pro-life marches. All that began in the times of the
first Solidarity
movement.
And one more date, 2002: The Hundred Women’s Letter to the
European Parliament. It contained a sobering assessment of the
relation between women, Church and state in the context of the
approaching referendum on Poland’s accession to the European
Union. Let me quote one key passage: „Behind the scenes of
Polish integration with the European Union, a barter of women’s
rights is taking place, disguised with the characteristic biased use
of language (…).

“Gazeta
Wyborcza” has recently published a new edition of Michnik’s
1976 Kościół
Lewica Dialog [The
Church, the Left, Dialogue]. From today’s perspective, the book
constitutes a fascinating record of Michnik’s – and more
broadly the secular, left-wing opposition community’s –
fascination with the Church. Time and again Michnik cuts himself off
from the legacy of the pre-war critic of the Church, Tadeusz
Boy-Żeleński and promotes „a dialogue with Christianity”
as an „anti-totalitarian encounter”.
He empathizes with the spiritual transformations of his lay friends,
who were searching for “inner harmony”
in “transcendence”. He dreams of an alliance between „the
lay and the Catholic left.”

This
is not my story. I grew up in the eighties as a child of two
atheists, sympathizers of the opposition, who signed me up for
religion classes because that seemed easier, because it shielded me
against anti-Semitism, and because it emphasized their oppositional
stance in relation to the political system of the time. What the
Church had to offer to a teenager in this period was not so much
inner peace and transcendence as nationalist rapture in a pro-life
setting. When I returned home excited after a screening of The
Silent Scream, armed
with slogans about the sanctity of “conceived
life,” my mother handed me a battered copy of Boy-Żeleński’s
book on the horrors of illegal abortion in interwar Poland. After the
initial shock, it downed on me that Piekło
kobiet [Women’s
Hell] was not only a highly reasonable text, but one that may soon be
timely. I cannot find myself in Michnik’s story about
de-Wojtylization – the loss of the spirit of John Paul II –
and about gratitude, betrayed hopes and mourning for the late Pope. I
did not cry when the Pope died. And if I also did not wear the “I
didn’t cry when the Pope died”
tee-shirt, it’s only because I am cautious by nature. After
all, in the area crucial to me as a woman and feminist—reproductive
rights and sexual ethics—the Church remains faithful to John
Paul II: adamant and adamantly hostile to women. Such was its
position in the times of Boy-Żeleński, in the times of communism, in
the times of the first Solidarity
movement,
in mid-nineties… and so it remains today. The problem is that
women’s rights have never been an important topic in Michnik’s
thinking. They don’t even play the role of a minor motif in his
narrative about Poland, the lay left, and his own struggles with
History and the Absolute. Cornered, Michnik will at best crack a joke
(as he does in the interview quoted above) that during a debate in
“Gazeta Wyborcza” „feminists took his pants off via
the head „
accusing him of being an agent of the Church. But clearly, he doesn’t
take our reprimands seriously. We do not count. We don’t even
appear in the footnotes. The transaction that we consider a breech of
the rules of democracy, a sign of meanness and a cruelty –
frankly, that transaction was from his point of view quite a good
deal. Representatives of the former democratic opposition handed over
to the Church a woman’s right to choose in return for the
bishops’ support for Poland’s accession to the European
Union. As feminist writer Kazimiera Szczuka ironically observes in
the film Podziemne
państwo kobiet [Women’s
Underground State], women’s rights in return for a YES in the
referendum was not, to the former dissidents, a high price to pay.

The
Church, considered a
priori the
mainstay of Polishness, the keeper of tradition, demanded that
women’s rights be taken away from them. So they were taken
away. Why? To quote a well-known song: “So that Poland could be
Poland”. The deal is done. We are now a member state of the
European Union. And the sign of our sovereignty as a “Catholic
country”
(carefully negotiated and recorded in a special clause of the
accession treaty) is the compliance of our authorities with the will
of the Church. The Church has no intention of giving back the once
executed toll; it has entrenched itself in its privileged position.
Its power is not waning, but growing. Reproductive rights continue to
atrophy: today we don’t even discuss the possibility of making
abortion legal again; we desperately speculate on how to oppose the
proposal of a ban on in
vitro fertilization.
It is time to define the swamp, to name its contents. The quagmire
whose fumes we breathe is a blend of politicized Catholicism and
national identity, an identity assumed to be homogenous and
unchangeable. It is an ideological attitude uncritically adopted from
the eighties, the time of struggle with the totalitarian system. It
is ideological in the sense that it proposes a coherent image of
social reality which it simultaneously legitimizes, in the sense that
is a set of opinions held collectively rather than individually. Most
of all, it is ideological because it cannot be verified, and yet it
regulates collective behavior. The precepts of this ideology are
rarely formulated explicitly; instead, what is offered is an insipid,
swampy, empty rhetoric, a peculiar sort of newspeak. It overflows
with words and phrases such as friendship, compromise, centuries-long
tradition and great achievements of the Church in the struggle with
totalitarianism.

In
his important book, Krytyka
solidarnościowego rozumu [A
critique of Solidarity’s
reason],
Sergiusz Kowalski has described the shaping of the categories and
assumptions which determined the thinking of the first Solidarity
and
which were later never questioned. The category of “the
majority”
was central for this way of thinking and experiencing the world,
majority perceived as a type of monolithic force resisting the
totalitarian power. The word “democracy” was repeated
like a mantra in this period, which was formative for the future,
free Poland. However, the model of the world which accompanied the
struggle for democracy was far from pluralistic. References were
frequently made to an ideal majority, to the Nation, which opposes
communism. The world was divided into US and THEM. All that was
“truly Polish,”
“authentic”, “ours”
was defined in opposition to the socialist state perceived as
artificial and unnatural. THEY were the soulless, dishonest system.
WE had the truth, WE represented the Nation. Ties with the past were
crucial to this perception of the world and Catholicism provided the
medium linking Solidarity’s
present
with the pre-socialist olden days. Thus the unquestioned authority of
the Catholic Church was solidified. In the context of the early
eighties the claim that Poland
is a Catholic country was
a challenge thrown at the oppressive system. In a liberal democracy,
however, the same words have an entirely different meaning: they are
a denial of democratic pluralism made from a neo-nationalist
position. In this new context it would be fitting to state clearly
what one means by “country”,
but no one – with the sole exception of the extreme right –
says this openly.

Therefore,
it seems worthwhile to quote a classic of Polish nationalist-Catholic
thought, whose words offer an honest and clear assessment of the
ingredients of the Polish quagmire
in its pre-war version:

“The
Polish state is a Catholic state. This is not merely due to the fact
that the majority of the population is Catholic, or that it is
Catholic in such and such proportion. Our position is that it is a
Catholic state to the full extent of the term’s meaning because
it is a national state, and our nation is a Catholic nation. Such a
position brings with it serious consequences. Namely, it entails that
state laws should guarantee freedom to all religious creeds, but the
ruling religion, the one whose principles are respected by the
state’s legislation, is the Catholic religion, and the Catholic
Church represents the religious side in all state functions.”

These
words were written in 1927.
Yet, I am convinced that they describe relations between the Church
and the state in today’s Poland; the present status
quo is
admittedly a watered-down version of the pre-war national-democratic
ideal, but the ingredients are the same. It is no accident that the
monument of Roman Dmowski – the author of the above quotation –
has for several years stood and still stands in a major square in
Warsaw. And it is no that accident that Nasi
Okupanci [Our
Occupiers], a work about the power of the church by Boy-Żeleński,
recently re-issued by the leftist think-tank Krytyka
Polityczna,
reads very much like a commentary on present day issues (and not just
thanks to the witty comments in its margins penned by Kazimiera
Szczuka).

Bubble
bubble,
my dear compatriots, Poland
is a Catholic country. And
Boy-Żeleński is no longer among us. When I begin to feel suffocated
by vapors rising from our quagmire, or when I begin to hear its
bubbling in my own thoughts, I return to an excellent essay by Kinga
Dunin, published in 2002 but still, sadly, relevant. Its title is
“Czarny ford i dwugłowe ciele, czyli Polak idzie do Unii”
[The Black Ford and the Two-headed Calf, or: a Polishman on his way
to the EU]. With her characteristic ironic wit, Dunin managed to
capture a state of affairs, which, if you stop to think about it, is
quite astonishing: on the one hand, the omnipresence and all but
omnipotence of the Church in Polish public life; on the other hand –
utter silence about this fact on the part of enlightened liberals,
participants of the public debate (which is often a debate about the
sorry state of public debate). Dunin strives to name and describe
that which I call the quagmire effect. She writes about „the
sacred fear that comes over people who wish to be considered decent
and reasonable, whenever they are called on to speak on matters which
an unwritten agreement has somehow placed within the power of the
Church.”
She also considers the symbolic function of the Church, respected by
all, which results in „a readiness to declare one’s
assent to the Church view in all matters labeled as “moral
issues.”

The
power of Dunin’s essay
lays in the ease with which she asks the fundamental questions that
nobody dares to ask in Poland. What is the place of Church discourse
in a pluralistic society? What function can be played in a public
debate by an institution that possesses, in its own view, an absolute
monopoly on truth, truth coming from God? Why is it that bishops
speak on behalf of the Nation as a whole? Dunin goes on to ask,
somewhat irreverently, about the relationship between the said Nation
and the actual people who happen to live in Poland: “Which
group and whose interests does the Church represent? (…) On
whose behalf is it speaking? All those who have been baptized? Those
who put coins in the basket during Sunday mass? Or does it speak for
the Church as an institution or as The Church hierarchy? Could it be
that it is taking care of its own economic interests? No, that cannot
be the case. The Church is beyond all suspicion….”

I
have recently come across another striking text – one whose
author captures the quagmire as it drowns the minds of my own
associates and friends – Polish feminists. Anna Dzierzgowska
writes about a visit that feminist activists – organizers of
the Polish Women’s Congress – paid to the archbishop
Nycz. She comments on this peculiar event as follows:

„…a visit with the archbishop, an
invitation extended to a priest (even the wisest of priests) to
comment on some weighty matter – each action of this kind
strengthens the general belief that no public debate in Poland can
possibly take place without the voice of the Catholic Church. When we
insist on getting the opinion of the Church on some political issue,
we in fact legitimize the right of
the Church to express political opinions. And so we remain stuck in
the vicious circle, conserving with our own actions the situation the
much-missed Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński once called,“the occupation of Poland.”

My
sentiments
– precisely. I call the vicious circle a quagmire, but the
intention seems the same. What I refer to as „quagmire”
is not so much the Church discourse as such, as the general readiness
to accept it as a primary point of reference on axiological issues, a
readiness also of those who in fact do not agree with the Church’s
standpoint. The practice of collective nodding is punctuated with
declarations of love and respect for John Paul II, as well as
statements of heart-felt grief after his death. Everyone seems to be
taking part in these social rituals – from toddlers in
kindergartens to soccer fans. I have recently come across a
declaration of respect and sympathy for John Paul II in a review of a
book described as a postmodern porn novel, apparently a breakthrough
in erotic literature. The reviewer informs us first, that the work is
“the blog of the mysterious Arundati (…) a de Sade in
skirt and stockings”.
Next we are told that the bold provocateur „likes JPII for „his
passion and fidelity (…) and for his wise patriotism,”
as well as for his ability to familiarize us with „old age,
sickness, dying (…)”.
At this point my initial urge to sneak a peek at such sinful reading
material suddenly evaporates. Perhaps this reaction is a sign of
intolerance – after all everyone, including a postmodernist and
self-professed creator of scandals, has the right to „like JPII
What troubles me, however, is that the tributes to the Polish Pope
are not carefully considered declarations of belief, but are
habitual, simply part of the way things are said and done. Such are
the boundaries of what comes to mind – including the mind of a
woman porn-writer.

The
Church discourse does not speak to
Polish
people, it speaks through
them,
often against their own better judgment. This is particularly painful
to watch in the case of women, because what the Church has to say
about our bodies and aspirations is so often at odds with our
feelings and desires. When I hear a young girl defend the woman’s
right to abortion slip into Church language with the term “conceived
life,”
I hear the quagmire sucking. When infertile women on an Internet
forum speak of the guilt they feel and the sense of sin they
experience as they prepare themselves for yet another round of IVF in
hope of a longed-for baby – I know the quagmire is bubbling
viciously. When I hear that the organizers of the Women’s
Congress paid the archbishop a friendly visit on my behalf, I think
to myself in resignation – well, it’s a quagmire, after
all. The media are delivering a peculiar bit of news just now:
compulsory funerals for fetuses are being performed in state
hospitals, paid for by the state, and without securing the consent of
the patients who miscarried. In the city of Kielce alone, there have
been 29 such ceremonies (six of them requested by the parents). I
read, rubbing my eyes in disbelief, the description of a fetus-burial
without the presence of parents. “There is a tiny coffin with
first name and last name on it, and the date of death, and the tiny
bodies are usually locked inside, in jars or other containers, and
there is a priest who performs the sprinkling with holy water, as
well as my employees – explains Darius Toborek, the director of
communal cemeteries in Kielce.”
I reread this description to make sure that I understood correctly.
Outside my window the wind is blowing, but if you listen carefully,
you might hear the quagmire’s bubbling: Poland
is a Catholic country. Poland is a Catholic country. Poland is a
Catholic country.

Translation
by Krystyna Mazur &
Agnieszka Graff,
with thanks to Regina
Graff for final
touches Sources and
inspirations:

Agnieszka
Graff (1970) –
Adjunct Professor in the American Studies Centers at the Warsaw
University where she lectures on American literature and culture. She
is also a lecturer in the Gender Studies at the Warsaw University.
She is a graduate from Amherst College (U.S.), Oxford University and
the School of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science. An author of two books
Świat bez kobiet.
Płeć w polskim życiu publicznym (World
Without Women. Gender In Polish Public Life, 2001) and Rykoszetem.
Rzecz o płci, seksualności I narodzie (Ricochet
or about Gender, Sexuality and the Nation, 2008) as well as many
articles about feminist thought, gender in the popular culture and
women’s movement in U.S. and Poland. She got a Fulbright
Fellowship (2004/ 2005) within the program for the New Century
Scholars „Towards Equality. The Global Empowerment of Women”.
She cooperates with Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland.